This year the International Conference on Persons will take place in late May (24-29), instead of early August as has been the norm. The reason for this is that it will be held at the Università della Calabria, just outside Cosenza, and some of the non-Italian organizers thought southern Italy would be too hot in August.

The local organizer this year is Giusy Gallo, who first attended the ICP at the University of Nottingham in 2009 and also participated at Lund in 2013. She is a philosopher of language who came in contact with personalism through her work on the relation between linguistics and Michael Polanyi’s concept of tacit knowledge, and she is the editor of the Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio (rifl.unical.it).

The conference website is found at icp2017italy.it (there is something wrong with the links function here right now).

Some of the papers from the 13th International Conference on Persons in Boston last year have now been published in Vernon Press’s Series in Philosophy under the title In the Sphere of the Personal: New Perspectives in the Philosophy of Persons. The volume is edited by James Beauregard and Simon Smith, who both first joined the ICP at the 12th meeting at Lund in 2013, and, I am pleased to note, have now become leading forces in the institution that is the ICP. At least one volume of ICP papers have been published in the past, but it was a long time ago; the Lund papers should, as I understood it, have been published by two of the American participants, but this never happened. My friends and colleagues Jim and Simon deserve all credit for reviving ICP proceedings publication and bringing together this valuable volume. They also provide a long introduction, and there is a foreword by Thomas O. Buford, one of the ICP’s founders.

All conference papers are seldom included in volumes like this, which are almost always selections only. Yet it is somewhat surprising that the papers by Ralph Ellis, James McLachlan, and Phillip Ferreira are missing, as is Robert Cummings Neville’s introduction to the closing panel which, as far as I can remember, would have been quite possible to publish in this volume.

In this connection, I should perhaps explain why I declined to have my own paper – which was presented in a plenary session, together with Phillip Ferreira, on idealistic personalism – included. The only reason is that I have decided to discontinue all adademic publication by way of protest against the decision last year of Prof. Thomas Kaiserfeld and Dr Monica Libell in the department of the history of ideas at Lund University that I can no longer teach there because of what they call my ideology – by which they mean my political views – and their public proclamation of this in the biggest daily Swedish newspaper, Dagens Nyheter.

It is not just that this decision left me without any academic institutional affiliation, so that I no longer know how to present myself in connection with publication. More important is the unacceptable reason given by them for this measure taken against me. Except for my writing in this very modest blog, I have in fact withdrawn from all publication, teaching and lecturing because of the appalling things that are suddenly being said or suggested about me here in Sweden by some people who do not approve of my political positions.

It could have been the case that Lund had found someone more competent to take my place, and if so, I would not have protested in the way I now have to do. I never held a formal position in the university, although I taught regularly and for 12 years. Given the almost total political control of the academy in Sweden, and, of course, the nature and substance of that control, it always seemed to me impossible to obtain such a position, and I hardly even tried. I taught only as an adjunct, and very little. In that sense at least, my teaching was not of any importance for the university. My protest concerns only the violation of the principle of academic freedom that Lund’s decision represents as explained by them with regard to its motive, and not least the spectacular public announcement of this motive.

As to what they meant by my ideology, no explanation was given, although it was clear from Dagens Nyheter’s article that they shared its view of what my ideology was, and I had also been privately informed that this was the case. The background of and the reason for Lund’s decision and statement was the attack on me and a few others by the Expo foundation in Sweden published on the website of their magazine in February 2015, an attack which had been referred to and repeated several times by Dagens Nyheter. But Expo has since withdrawn their article (written by Jonathan Leman) under threat of legal action.

It is not only that Expo’s and Dagens Nyheter’s allegations are untrue. The university’s motive and statement about this motive, i.e. about my political positions, are completely unacceptable quite regardless of this. There has, to my knowledge, never been any complaint from either students or colleagues about my teaching, my publications, or any other contributions of mine to the life and work of the university, and none of this has ever been considered to have been unduly influenced by my political views.

Not least Libell’s public statement to Dagens Nyheter – about Kaiserfeld’s decision and motive – means that what we have to do with here is an indefensible political act on their part. I wish to draw attention to this fact, and to insist that this kind of behaviour from professors, department heads and university administrators must not be accepted or tolerated. Their ideology should be rejected, they should not, in their academic capacities, embrace the ideology that is the basis of their action against me, they should be dismissed from the university.

I wish to thank those of my colleagues in the academic community as represented in other countries who have shown support in this new situation, and to thank them also for the kind interest in and great appreciation of my work that they have shown in the past. I may continue to attend the ICP because of my organizational responsibilities there, and perhaps also other conferences, but I will no longer present papers. Funding will be a problem however, since it seems I will now no longer be able to publish anything in any connection which pays (or at least not where I would like to be published), nor receive any research and travel grants.

Whether or not my paper would have added anything of value to the present volume, it seems clear that the papers of the others mentioned above would. But even without them, there are several important ones, not least those contributed by Juan Manuel Burgos who also joined the ICP at Lund, and the ICP veteran Richard Prust. One of the papers on which I was the commentator in Boston is indeed so important that I should devote a separate post to it. Among arguments related to a misleading title, we find Rolf Ahlers discussing recent German scholarship on Jacobi – one of the central figures in my book The Worldview of Personalism – that confirms my own argument about the relation between him and German idealism, and is of considerable importance not only for personalism but for idealism studies.

This is the abstract of my paper, ‘Further Considerations on Personalism and Idealism’, at the 13th International Conference on Persons in Boston earlier this month:

Sitting down for questions and discussion after reading the paper (Photo: Jane Ferreira)

Boston personalism was originally, and has to some extent remained, an idealistic philosophy. Borden Parker Bowne’s work represents, as does that of his British contemporary, Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison, not least a further, independent development of central themes in German Spätidealismus in the 19th century. In this respect it differs considerably from the – often converging – main forms of European personalism, which are related to distinctly non-idealist currents such as phenomenology, existentialism, and neo-Thomism. In this paper I reexamine some aspects of the question of the relationship between personalism and idealism in the light of recent idealism scholarship and of a partial assessment of what can be considered to be of lasting value and relevance in idealism. Taking into account the European background of idealistic personalism, it is necessary to raise anew the fundamental issue of the definition of idealism, and to distinguish between some of its main versions, including a brief recapitulation of its transformations in the 20th century. My conclusion is that, whether or not personalism, as Bowne argued, is intrinsically and necessarily idealistic, the insights and resources of idealism remain not just valid but important and badly needed precisely for personalism.

Michelle Maiese is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Emmanuel College in Boston. Her research focuses on issues in philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychiatry, and the emotions. In recent work, she has examined enactivism, the integration of emotion and cognition, and the nature of psychopathology. She is the author of Embodied Minds in Action (co-written with Robert Hanna, 2009) and Embodiment, Emotion, and Cognition (2011).

Juan Manuel Burgos is a leading personalist philosopher in the Spanish-speaking world with a growing influence in Europe and America. He is Profesor Titular at the University San Pablo CEU in Madrid and has been a guest professor and delivered conferences in Britain, USA, Poland, Mexico, Sweden, Argentina, Chile, Colombia and many other countries. He is also the founder and president of the Spanish Association of Personalism and of the Asociación Iberoamericana de Personalismo, and founder and editor of Quién. Revista de Filosofía personalista. Burgos specializes in anthropology and personalism; among his books are Antropología: una guía para la existencia, Repensar la naturaleza humana, and Introducción al personalismo. Some of them have been published in Polish and Portuguese translations, and the last mentioned is currently being translated into English. Studies of Burgos’s philosophy have been published by Beauregard, Bermeo, Seifert and others.

Jan Olof Bengtsson teaches the history of ideas at Lund University in Sweden. He is best known for his book The Worldview of Personalism: Origins and Early Development, to which a special issue of the journal The Pluralist was devoted in 2008. He has published articles and book chapters on personalism, idealism, and so-called value-centered historicism, the most recent being a chapter on the origins and meaning of the German concept of “late idealism” (Spätidealismus). He is the author of the entries on personalism in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (with Thomas D. Williams) and Springer’s Encyclopedia of Sciences and Religions. He has also published a Swedish introduction to and translation of Eric Voegelin’s Wissenschaft, Politik und Gnosis. He regularly attends conferences on personalism and idealism in Europe and America, and, in 2013, organized the 12th International Conference on Persons at Lund.

Phillip Ferreira is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Kutztown University. His work focuses on 19th century idealism and its relation to contemporary thought. He is author of Bradley and the Structure of Knowledge (1999) and many articles on philosophical idealism.

Randall E. Auxier is Professor of Philosophy at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, where he specializes in process philosophy, American idealism, and the philosophy of culture. He is author of Time, Will, and Purpose: Living Ideas from the Philosophy of Josiah Royce (2013) and co-author (with Gary Herstein) of The Quantum of Explanation: Whitehead’s Radical Empiricism (forthcoming). He has edited seven volumes of the Library of Living Philosophers and was for 15 years the editor of The Personalist Forum and its successor, The Pluralist. He writes popularly for books, magazines, newspapers and blogs, along with the usual scholarly journals.

Robert Cummings Neville is Professor of Philosophy and Systematic Theology at Boston University. He is formerly the Dean of the School of Theology at BU and is author of over 25 books, including his recent three-volume Philosophical Theology (SUNY Press, 2014-15), as well as Religion in Late Modernity (2002), The Truth of Broken Symbols (1995), The Cosmology of Freedom (1974), The Tao and the Daimon (1981), Boston Confucianism (2000), and many others. He is well known as a leader in comparative philosophy and theology and as a critic of personalism and process thought.

Ralph Ellis received his PhD in philosophy at Duquesne University and a postdoctoral M.S. in Public Affairs at Georgia State University. He has worked as a social worker as well as teaching philosophy, and is interested in applied phenomenology and integrating the social sciences with philosophy of mind. His books include An Ontology of Consciousness (1986), Theories of Criminal Justice (1989), Coherence and Verification in Ethics (1992), Questioning Consciousness (1995), Eros in a Narcissistic Culture (1996), Just Results: Ethical Foundations for Policy Analysis (1998), The Caldron of Consciousness: Affect, Motivation, and Self‑Organization (2000), Love and the Abyss (2004), Curious Emotions (2005), Foundations of Civic Engagement (2006, co-authored with Jim Sauer and Norm Fischer), How the Mind Uses the Brain (2010, co-authored with Natika Newton), and a critical thinking textbook, The Craft of Thinking. Ellis is also co-editor with Peter Zachar of a book series, Consciousness & Emotion (www.benjamins.nl/jbp).

Lodging will be at the Boston Common Hotel at the rate of $169 per night (plus tax), which is very affordable by Boston standards and is within easy reach of Boston University. When making reservations, mention the International Conference on Persons to get the conference rate. Space is limited, so it is best to reserve early, 617-933-7700, or you can reserve your room through the hotel website by clicking the “BOOK NOW” tab on the hotel’s main page. It will ask for the dates. Please fill in August 3 through 7 (even if you plan to stay longer). It will direct you to a list. Choose the room that fits your needs. The next page will be for advance payment – it is non-refundable. In the “Special Requests” box on that page, fill in that you are attending the International Conference on Persons, and if you need days apart from August 3-7, put that information there. You will be contacted for further adjustment of the reservation.

We have also reserved a block of rooms at Boston University. These are suites of four single rooms (each with one single bed) connected by a common area, with limited kitchen facilities, and available for $67 per person per night. This option will make sense for those who are traveling alone and on a limited budget. If two are traveling together they would have to sleep in separate rooms, share a bathroom, and pay $67 each (i.e., $134 together), and this means the hotel will probably be the more attractive option. But for those traveling alone with a limited budget, the BU apartment style dormitory is the best option. For this option, send an e-mail to the conference e-mail address with the word “accommodations” in the subject line and you will be contacted from there.

For overflow, or for those who want something a little bit snazzier, we recommend The Boxer Hotel. It is located on the Green Line of the Boston T and is a straight and easy ride to Boston University. There is no special conference rate, but the rates are very reasonable by Boston standards (starting at about $216 per night), and they are aware that we are referring people as overflow for the conference.

Last week I spoke at the British Personalist Forum’s excellent conference on British Contributions to Personalist Philosophy: Duns Scotus to the Present Day in Oriel College, Oxford. Several prominent personalists and historians of British philosophy were in attendance, and Raymond Tallis was a special guest speaker (see the programme). I read a revised version of a paper from a conference on British idealism in 2013, ‘In Defence of the Personal Idealist Conception of the Finite Self’, with an added extensive, informal introduction.

I want to congratulate Richard Allen, Alan Ford, Simon Smith and my other friends in the BPA for this major success and step forward in the development of their group and its important scholarly events. This is how they described the aims of their conference:

“Although John Grote (Knightsbridge Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge) in 1865 named his own philosophy ‘personalism’, hardly any other British philosophers have been designated, by themselves or others, as ‘personalists’, save perhaps for the ‘Personal Idealists’ of c. 1885-1920.

Nevertheless some have focused upon personal existence and the freedom, responsibility and dignity of the individual person who is also a person in relation to other persons, and other philosophers have at least dealt with one or more aspects of distinctively personal existence, and have done so in terms, concepts and categories truly appropriate to persons as distinct from ones applicable only to sub-personal or impersonal entities or those of merely formal logic.

The aim of this conference is to bring to wider notice those British philosophers who have made such contributions to personalist philosophy, not only to amend the historical record which has often neglected them, but also to suggest why they are worth reading today.”

Papers in any area or discipline are welcome, so long as their themes are of concern to the ideas and concepts of persons, personhood, and personality as a philosophical, theological, psychological, social, political, historical, creative or linguistic concern.

Papers must not exceed a length of 3000 words and should be prepared for blind review.

In the e-mail sent with the submission, we require the following eight items:

1. Word count – 3000 words maximum

2. Author’s name

3. Academic status (professor, unaffiliated, graduate student)

4. Institutional affiliation (if any)

5. Mailing address

6. E-mail address

7. The paper’s title

8. An abstract – 200 words maximum

Submission deadline for abstracts is MAY 25th, 2015. Abstracts will be accepted on that date, with full texts of paper due by July 1.

Submissions which do not include items 2-8 (if only abstract is being submitted) will be disqualified. Word count is due when full paper is submitted. No more than one submission by the same author will be considered.

Email as an attachment a copy of your paper and/or abstract in rich text format to:

Papers and/or abstracts will be reviewed by a committee. Notification of acceptance will be made via email in early June.

Each paper will have a commentator. Those interested in commenting should send a note to PersonsConference2015@gmail.com by May 25th detailing availability and areas of interest. Persons whose papers are accepted will be expected to serve as commentators, if asked.

Copies of papers will be available by July 1st. E-mails of authors will also be available for purposes of sending your commentary in advance of the conference.

Lodging Details will be announced soon, The Conference will begin with Registration from noon on Mon. August 3rd. Further details about meals, schedules, and Conference fees will be provided as they become available.

8th International Conference on Persons. I suggest to Lech Wałęsa that there is reason for Poland be more critical of the EU, and, with its recent experience of totalitarian oppression, to set an example for Western Europe in this regard. Politics were of course inevitable in Wałęsa’s long and important opening address and in the discussion following it, but the role of personalism in recent history was strongly emphasized.

The Radhadesh website is temporarily offline for technical reasons so I cannot link to it here; awaiting the solution of the technical problems, they refer to this temporary blog. Radhadesh is almost certainly the most important ISKCON temple community in Europe, and the site not only of the temple and of ashramas, but also, and not least, of many important international conferences since the early 1990s. Among them I have attended several ISKCON Communications Seminars and ISKCON Conventions, and one meeting of the Bhaktivedanta Academy of Arts and Sciences, all with many prominent Hinduism and other religion scholars from inside and outside of ISKCON.

The restaurant (Photo: Jean Housen)

Radhadesh has gradually been developed into a first class conference centre with a new hotel – called a guesthouse – next to the château, and an excellent restaurant in an adjacent building. However, I think this was the first time the ISKCON Studies Conference was held here – a couple of years ago I spoke on ‘Conversion, Preaching, and Western Cultural Identity’ at an earlier ISC on the theme of Transmitting the Truth: Education, Preaching, and Conversion in ISKCON, at the equally beautiful Villa Vrindavana outside Florence; as far as I understand, that paper will soon appear in the next issue of the ISKCON Studies Journal. Radhadesh is also the site of Bhaktivedanta College, where ten years ago I taught the introduction to Western philosophy course. Since I was last there, a new building for accommodation of the students, as well as for the college library, had been built. Finally, on the premises is also found the building housing the Bhaktivedanta Library Services.

During this visit to Belgium I also had the opportunity to take photos of some parts of or with certain angles on Poelaert’s Palais de Justice in Brussels which I have not been able to find on the internet, and some of the Parc de Bruxelles by the Palais Royal and the streets next to it. I plan to publish them here. The many beautiful late nineteenth-century buildings on Avenue du Midi south of Place Rouppe, Boulevard Maurice Lemonnier, Boulevard Anspach, and Boulevard Adolphe Max must also be photographed on some other occasion. Especially the first two of these are in a part of Brussels that seems to be quickly slummed now (most of central Brussels is), so that it is not clear to what extent the buildings will be preserved. Buildings of this kind remain continuously threatened all over the world since the process of discovery of the fact that this was a golden age of architecture (as of much else) is still very slow. In some places, they are still almost systematically destroyed, and because of the lack of interest in them, they are not even properly photographed. Hotel Métropole on Place de Brouckère is now Brussels’ only remaining nineteenth-century hotel, and striving to preserve as much as possible of its original design etc. Imaginative historical reconstruction is needed in order to understand how beautiful and well-ordered this area was a hundred years ago. I also had time for a short visit to Leuven.

A corner of the main temple room, with the murti of His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada

But I digress. Here is the abstract of my presentation, ‘Personalism East and West’:

This presentation will be an introduction to the comparative study of Eastern and Western personalism, with special reference to the personalism of the theistic form of Vedanta represented by ISKCON. A certain kind of propedeutic to this study is necessary, since without it, the real nature and implications of the differences between the respective forms of personalism are normally overlooked and the similarities to some extent misconstrued and misunderstood. The relevant historical, cultural and intellectual contexts will therefore be outlined, and only with these basic perspectives firmly in place will the presentation move on to a brief overview of the conceptual and terminological histories of “person” and related notions in the West and of comparable ideas in the East. This overview will, for the purposes of the introduction to the subject, be given exclusively in light of and with constant reference to the mentioned fundamental perspectives on the general, constitutive characteristics of and differences between Eastern and Western thought as historically developed. In this way, the presesentation will seek to prepare the ground for a subsequent step in the comparative work, through which, along with more particularized study of individual personalist thinkers, schools, and positions, meaningful East-West relations can be established and possibilities of mutual influence and adjustment and new syntheses fruitfully explored.

Simon Smith has published a report on the conference on the website of the British Personalist Forum. The BPF is the new name of the Society for Post-Critical and Personalist Studies, started by Richard Allen who organized the excellent 2009 ICP in Nottingham but unfortunately could not come this year; Allen and the BPF publish the journal Appraisal.

I want to extend my warmest thanks to all sixty-one participants, presenting as well as non-presenting, for your contributions to this year’s International Conference on Persons. It was a pleasure to receive you at Lund. Together, you made the event a success.

Most of all, my co-organizer, Randall E. Auxier of Southern Illinois University Carbondale, the current editor of the Library of Living Philosophers, deserves credit for making this a memorable conference.

Randall E. Auxier

Special mention must also be made of our wonderful conference assistant Rebecka Klette, a promising student in our department of the History of Ideas, who took care of the welcome reception, the coffee breaks, and much else; without her, the meeting would not have been possible.

Rebecka Klette

My friend and colleague Jonas Hansson also set aside much time and energy to see to that everything ran smoothly.

A number of partners or accompanying persons who attended the conference dinner and in some cases a few of the sessions also contributed to the event.

My thanks go, finally, to Kungliga Humanistiska Vetenskapssamfundet i Lund; to Prof. Marianne Thormählen; to Prof. Thomas Kaiserfeld, Christel Anderberg, Kristiina Savin, Karin Salomonsson, and Susann Roos in the department of Arts and Cultural Sciences; to MediaTryck; and to the staff of Hotel Concordia and of the Grand Hotel.

I, Randy, Tom Buford and other past organizers of the ICP whom you met hope we will get an opportunity to see you all again at future ICPs.

At least two prominent publishers have expressed an interest in publishing the proceedings in book form; we will come back to you with information about this as soon as possible.

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Read more about the 12th International Conference on Persons under Uncategorized or on the conference website.